Johnny Salo receiving his commission as a Passaic city police officer. courtesy of northjersey.com. unemployment were behind him. He used his prize money to by a cozy house and settled down to walk a beat as the “flying cop from Passaic.” In 1929 he took a leave of absence from the force and entered the 1929 race as the heir apparent to win the second Bunion Derby.
The bearded wonder
Pete Gavuzzi of England had a grudge to settle. In 1928, this diminutive, trilingual 22-year-old bunioneer had a lock on first place and its $25,000 in prize money. With only days to go in the race, he was forced out with infected tooth that made it impossible for him to eat. He literally ran out of gas with the prize money in his grasp. Gavuzzi, who would not shave for the duration of the 1929 race, was the Fred Astaire of the Bunion Derby, with a flowing and seemingly effortless style. He had returned to reclaim his $25,000 prize.
The Director General
Leading the derby parade across America was Charley Pyle, the paunchy, middle-aged sports agent who directed the first bunion derby the year before. In 1925, Pyle was an obscure figure until he signed the greatest football player of the decade, Red Grange, to a professional sports contract. Under Pyle’s leadership both men made a fortune, but Charley bled away most of what he
had made when he established his own NFL team and managed the first derby. Pyle was a marketing genius but an abysmal manager. In 1929, Pyle was teetering on bankruptcy, but he still thought he could make trans-America racing a profitable affair on his second try. His money-making engine would be his traveling vaudeville group, C. C. Pyle’s Cross Country Follies, complete with a New York dance troupe dubbed the Dancing Debutants, an all-women band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians. Pyle housed his troupe under a massive circus tent that he hoped he would pack with paying customers to come up with the $60,000 in total prize money. Charley, who grandly dubbed himself the Director General of the Bunion Derby, had no other sources of income. He had to make the follies a paying proportion if he had any hope of paying his bunioneers their prize money.
The final battles
As the bunioneers crossed Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, the three front-runners, Salo, Gavuzzi and Gardner, kept pushing each other to go faster, often running 30 to 40 miles a day at a seven to eight minute per mile pace. The rest of the runners kept shaking their heads in wonder as the three men pulled farther away from the pack. In the 1928 race, Andy Payne of Oklahoma had won the contest by “stepping along” at about a ten minute per mile pace. J U N E 2 014 • w w w. n w r u n n e r. c o m
NORTHWEST RUNNER
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